Modularity without modules…what’s the point?

Posted on December 28, 2011 by Craig

If you follow me on Twitter, you might have an idea that my son is currently without one of his rides (i.e. a Razor Cruiser kick scooter). My son is big and tall for his age, and this scooter is perfect for him.

Like most boys his age, though, he doesn’t understand “cruiser” in the face of a neighborhood of boys who all like to jump all manner of wheeled vehicle. As a result of this lack of appreciation (er, love of both scooter and jumping), what looked like

now looks like

Do you see the opportunity?

Razor makes a quality product–one the is easy to use and maintain. Ease of maintenance is largely facilitated by modularity of design.

So when my son came to me with the disappointment of pushing his ride too hard, my first thought was to simply disassemble the scooter to isolate the failed part (deck). Easily accomplished.

Except that apparently Razor and its authorized parts retailers doesn’t stock replacement decks for the Cruiser kick scooter.

So…Razor built a modular kick scooter but doesn’t stock a critical module (deck).

What’s the point of modularity, if there are no modules (i.e. ability to swap module instances that fulfill necessary interfaces)?

My son’s predicament is clearly of his own making, but herein is opportunity for Razor. Beyond already clearly stating what their product is designed to perform, Razor can anticipate that boys will be boys and provide timely relief in the form of complete replacement parts, including readily available decks.

Within earshot of my son are more than a dozen boys of similar age, and they’re always outside planning their next jump. Many already own their own Razor, too. What if he could turn around an accident with word that Razor saved the day? Talk about brand advocacy and social media!

What’s your Razor-like story? What’s your Razor-like opportunity?

Cloud first, mobile first, social first

Posted on July 29, 2011 by Craig

The Adobe® Digital Enterprise Platform (ADEP) Experience Server supports WAN clustering (important in high latency situations and given distributed infrastructure), hot cluster join (allowing you to expand infrastructure on the fly), and runs in a very small memory and CPU footprint. This makes the Experience Server suitable for deployment in the cloud, whether actual deployments are done there or on premise.[1]

In pursuing interaction patterns, ADEP starts its approach with mobile devices (particularly tablets) and then expands to consider other environments. ADEP can detect over 17,000 devices,[2] enabling content contributors to understand exactly what experience will be delivered to segmented content consumers via device emulation support. ADEP presents the concept of device groups to reduce the complexity and managing the diverse range of never-ending devices and device types.

Today’s customer increasingly leverages social activities to gain validation of their decisions and to share them with others. ADEP supports a range of social capabilities including support for local communities and the ability to glean information from public communities (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and use that information to tailor the customer experience. Social capabilities in the platform are much like the public social environment: they surround everything we do and are available for use at any time for any purpose.

With ADEP:

You build applications for the cloud with on premise in mind,
You build applications for mobile with desktop in mind, and
You understand that every user is a contributor and has a social graph.

This post wraps up the current series on ADEP architecture principles. Now that we have a shared frame of reference, we’ll return to ADEP Developer Center as a PDF download. Please feel free to provide me with your feedback on that work here. Thanks in advance!

Footnotes:
[1] i.e. ADEP Experience Server is “cloud ready”
[2] Adobe’s Customer Experience Solution for Web Experience Management (previously known as CQ5), leverages the WURFL device description repository.

Thoughts on social software

Posted on June 2, 2011 by Craig

Social is a popular adjective in software these days (along with cloud and mobile); so, I thought I’d capture some of how I view social in light of enterprise software and customer experience.

When I think about “social software” I think about how experiences are impressionable (e.g. customers can leave impressions causing other direct/indirect participants to learn/benefit/dialog/collaborate). To me, “social” means allowing users to leave impressions such that impressions are mined for context and understood in context. Software that embraces this notion of sociability becomes more context-sensitive as a whole much like a piece of UI might present or hide itself depending on context (e.g. user’s role, workflow state, etc.) or a different service is invoked depending on context (e.g. SLA).

To me, “social software” isn’t about simply sprinkling social artifacts into existing systems (e.g. adding tags, ranking, etc.). It’s about ensuring that software incorporates sociability into its equilibrium as presented to customers.

One hears “less is more” and “more is more.” I find that both can be true, and the user will ultimate indicate the truth. In the case of providing more context, a user action to exclude is social to the underlying system, if that system is built to recognize it as such. That is, being exclusive is part of being social; excluding (and including) is a form of engagement. “Social software” must promote engagement–for relationship-based business benefit.

Being social can mean being friendly (i.e. sensitive to past expressions of preference, a form of context, as well current inference of the task at hand in a framing goal). A context-sensitive platform should go beyond just facilitating “one degree of friendliness.” It should anticipate the implications of deeper…collaboration. When a compelling experience and frictionless interaction is delivered to one, it can become a beacon for many subsequent experiences and interactions. So, how can this downstream effect be understood up front? How should context-sensitivity adjust, pivot, etc. to optimally understand this potential (reality)? “Social software” get this at its core.

Social is about collaboration–with purpose. To understand/infer purpose requires being sensitive to context.[1]

My definition of being social is as follows: a software system that allows any user to leave an impression, expecting that the system will recognize it, understand it and subsequently bring it to bear on the resulting experience, across space and time (i.e. same customer and/or different customer(s), immediately and/or in the future). This is just one of the traits we’re building into our enterprise platform at Adobe.

[1] For more on context, you may want to check out what my colleague Ben Watson has started over at Contextography.com.

Program or Be Programmed

Posted on January 1, 2011 by Craig

The industrial age challenged us to rethink the limits of the human body: Where does my body end and the tool begin? The digital age challenges us to rethink the limits of the human mind: What are the boundaries of my cognition?

It’s tragically ironic that the tagline for Douglas Rushkoff’s book incorporates an Old Testament reference to the Ten Commandments, since Rushkoff writes in his introduction that the Jewish race has, since the time of Moses, merely promoted an “enduring myth” where the contents of those stone tablets is concerned.

Regardless, Rushkoff’s perspective is fascinating and worth some contemplation:

Are we just learning to use programs or are we learning to make programs?
Do we favor the distracted over the focused, the automatic over the considered, and the contrary over the compassionate? Why?
Do we merely grant our kids access to the capabilities given to them by others, or do we empower them to determine the value-creating capabilities of these technologies for themselves?
Do we pursue new abilities, or do we fetishize new toys?
Are we optimizing our machines for humanity, or are we optimizing humans for machinery?
Do we think and behave differently when operating different technology as we do given different settings?
Are we allowing computers and networks to discourage our more complex processes–our higher order cognition, contemplation, innovation, and meaning making–in addition to copying our intellectual processes (i.e. our repeatable programs)?

…and these are questions that arise after reading just the introductory chapter…

Apparently Rushkoff’s book grew from a short talk he has given on the subject, and there is substantial commentary to wade into just on the talk alone. [1][2]

Contemplation. Something that can all to easily become sacrificed on the altar of busyness. Something to fight for, protect and prize. Warmly embracing why.

Here’s to a 2011 that is more focused, considered and compassionate!

[1] http://rushkoff.com/2010/03/25/program-or-be-programmed/
[2] http://boingboing.net/2010/03/30/rushkoff-program-or.html

Getting Twitter

Posted on April 23, 2009 by Craig

Yeah, I know that Twitter lately is all about Oprah, CNN and Ashton Kutcher, but it’s also about brief remarks, gripes and triumphs related to products and/or services that you send into the world wide market. (And if you were waiting for The Tipping Point, it’s already occurred for Twitter, IMHO.)

BTW, before I go any further, I’m @craigsmusings on Twitter. (Thanks, Dan.)

If a tree falls in a forest, it always makes a noise–regardless of your presence there. There are social conversations that occur online (e.g. Facebook, blogs, wikis, Twitter, newsgroups, IIRC, etc.), and they will continue to occur regardless of your presence there, too. However, that’s an especially risky position to take these days–see the conversation but not engage.

Consider the following conversation on Twitter:

http://twitter.com/johnsmith

Very disappointed in _YOUR_PRODUCT_HERE_, does not appear to have very much to it at all….if anything!
12:10 AM Apr 23rd from TweetDeck

http://twitter.com/janedoe

@johnsmith Did you see a live presentation or play with it,
4:45 AM Apr 23rd from TwitterBerry

http://twitter.com/johnsmith

@janedoe Had a play with it, will blog later this week, does not seem to give us anything to use as an accelerator
4:52 AM Apr 23rd from TweetDeck in reply to janedoe

http://twitter.com/janedoe

@johnsmith Ouch! That’s the point in theory.
4:58 AM Apr 23rd from TwitterBerry

So, what will John Smith blog exactly? He’s indicated that his post is forthcoming but also that there may be time to engage him–understand his concern and possibly influence him after listening by demonstrating value.

Jane appears to be an interested party, too. Is Jane a known advocate, possibly trying to reach out on your behalf? Is Jane known to be skeptical?

How can you “see” this conversation?

I use TweetDeck, an Adobe AIR-based Twitter client, for my tweeting, etc. It works equally well on both MacOS and Windows. (There are many other clients out there, too!)

TweetDeck allows me to do a number of useful things.

For example, the leftmost column/pane is a group. (You can read that tiny font, right? ) In my case, I filtered All Friends (i.e. those I follow in Twitter) into just the subset that tweets about content management. (You can see that there is a horizontal scroll bar on the bottom, and the default “All Friends” column/pane is off to the far right (where I moved it to reduce seen UI changes).)
The “Replies” column/pane is just what it implies—tweets in reply to me from others.
The “Direct Messages” column/pane contains DM’s from me and DM’s to me.
The two rightmost columns/panes in view above are searches. Since these are Twitter-based searches–one for tweets containing “CMIS” and another for tweets containing both “EMC” and “Documentum”–I receive traffic updates that apply in near realtime (unlike, e.g., a Google search that requires one to hit Refresh to see new results).

Anyway, I can visit John Smith’s Twitter profile to learn that he has a 70:30 ratio (i.e. he’s following 70 twitters and 30 twitters are following him). Clearly, Mr. Smith is not a “rock star” by Twitter standards. (Certainly, I am not either!)

However, consider the junior high campfire song’s sentiment: “It only takes a spark, to get a fire going…” This goes back to my point above: there may be time to engage him–understand his concern and possibly influence him after listening by demonstrating value (and create a positive fire–however big or small–about your product or service).

The truth is that, although I’ve been blogging for awhile now, I’m relatively new to Twitter. Fortunately for me, I have great resources in my “2.0 type” EMC colleagues and elsewhere online. For example, I recommend that you check out Gina Minks’ Twitter Cheat Sheet. (I understand from Gina that a v2.0 release is due out in time for EMC World, too.)

I recall during last year’s Microsoft Strategic Architect Forum (SAF) that a good industry colleague of mine suggested a “I don’t get Twitter” topic for the open space segment of that afternoon. I egged him on to make the suggestion; so, of course I attended…and I think that everyone learned a fair bit in the process.

Since then I’ve only recently begun to seriously tweet. Already that engagement has paid dividends, and due to the fact that most of my cross-domain architect colleagues don’t yet tweet, I thought I’d humbly offer this post to get them to “dive into” Twitter, too, in a way that’s both meaningful to them and meaningful to their communities. (You know who you are. )

For those who weren’t at or don’t know about SAF, Microsoft worked with Mindjet to mind map the open space sessions. Here are the notes from the “I don’t get Twitter” session in mind map form–just click the following image for the .mmap (MindManager 8 format) file:

So, what do you think of Twitter? If you find it useful, how do you receive value from it?

Update 4/30/2009: Gina Minks just published a new cheat sheet for tweeting from your phone.